Coming from the wars of words

It was 1971, at the Dudley Hotel, Hove, late at night during a Tory conference, and Sir (as he then wasn’t) Max Hastings and I were discussing editorship. He was then working for the BBC. Specifically, we were talking about the editorship of the New Statesman. There was discontent there about the tenure of R. H. S. Crossman. It was felt he could not last much longer (he was to depart next year). Max thought Anthony Howard would be an excellent successor, as, indeed, he turned out to be. For himself, he was uninterested in such baubles. ‘What I really like doing,’ he said – I remember his words exactly – ‘is sleeping under an Israeli tank, looking up at the stars.’

This did not seem to me to be the ideal way to spend the night but I refrained from saying so, as it must have been obvious. Max, by contrast, was even then a leading graduate of what I call the Hemingway School of Journalism.